Taken old server out of Storage Room

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takeawaydave

Member
Aug 20, 2013
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I started a new job recently and need to run a home lab to get up to speed. I have an old server which I was hoping to setup as a home lab.

It's a bit of a mixed bag but has an onboard SAS2008 RAID Controller along with 4 2TB HDDs hooked up.

I would like to strip out the old graphics card, sound card and run it as a headless ESXi Server.

If I wanted the 4 x 2 TB HDD's to be more main datastore what would be the best way to go about doing this keeping in mind reasonable redundancy and any disk speed IO advantages I might be able to see along the way?
 

seang86s

Member
Feb 19, 2013
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If you don't want to invest in any additional hardware and use what you have you could try booting ESXi off of USB (slow, but its a home lab) and carve up the four 2TB drives into a couple of RAID1's so you can try storage vMotions. If you want more capacity, create a single RAID5 and divide it up into different logical drives. Problem here is the write will be going to same spindle as the read.

Better yet, once you got ESXi running on this lone machine look into installing ESXi as a VM. Then you can setup a 3 machine cluster and fool with all the Enterprise features that you'll usually find in a corporate environment. Eval licenses are good for 30 days. Or subscribe to a VMUG license and get all the vmware products for lab/training use.
 
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takeawaydave

Member
Aug 20, 2013
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Will ESXi create the SW RAID?
I don't really need to learn VMware as such I just need a stable platform to run VM's as performant as possible.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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If it’s only to run VM’s, how many and what type ? Could it make more sense if you have a nice fast laptop/desktop just to use VMware player or virtual box, if a Mac parallels or VMware fusion and take advantage of the fact you hopefully have a modern CPU and nice fast NVMe storage all sitting at you desk on on your lap ?

My 16gb MacBook Pro can happily run 3 or 4 windows VM’s fast, and that’s using decent memory per VM (3gb or 4gb), if it’s just small Linux or smalller windows VM’s can easily run more as well.
 

K D

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Dec 24, 2016
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You can flash the sas2008 to IR mode and run the drives in Raid 1 and use it as a datastore in esxi.
 

takeawaydave

Member
Aug 20, 2013
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If it’s only to run VM’s, how many and what type ? Could it make more sense if you have a nice fast laptop/desktop just to use VMware player or virtual box, if a Mac parallels or VMware fusion and take advantage of the fact you hopefully have a modern CPU and nice fast NVMe storage all sitting at you desk on on your lap ?

My 16gb MacBook Pro can happily run 3 or 4 windows VM’s fast, and that’s using decent memory per VM (3gb or 4gb), if it’s just small Linux or smalller windows VM’s can easily run more as well.
There are 24 cores and 48 GB of RAM. I need to run 5 Windows Servers each having around 6 GB RAM and 4 Cores and then as many Windows, Linux Client Machines as possible which would probably run wit h1 GB RAM and 1 vCPU.
 

takeawaydave

Member
Aug 20, 2013
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You can flash the sas2008 to IR mode and run the drives in Raid 1 and use it as a datastore in esxi.
Any idea whether RAID 1 + 0 is possible. I could live with reduced capacity if I were able to mirror and stripe. Perhaps there would be a slight performance gain than a a straight RAID 1??
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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There are 24 cores and 48 GB of RAM. I need to run 5 Windows Servers each having around 6 GB RAM and 4 Cores and then as many Windows, Linux Client Machines as possible which would probably run wit h1 GB RAM and 1 vCPU.
Fair point, just thought i would throw and alternative idea out there. Sadly if you need that much resource it’s unlikly 4 x 2TB spinning disks will work very well either, probably need some decent SSD or a lot more spindles to get some decent IOPS
 

takeawaydave

Member
Aug 20, 2013
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Fair point, just thought i would throw and alternative idea out there. Sadly if you need that much resource it’s unlikly 4 x 2TB spinning disks will work very well either, probably need some decent SSD or a lot more spindles to get some decent IOPS
I was thinking the same myself - not holding out much for the 4 x 2TB RAID 10 array! Actually just flashed the SAS2008 to IR and built the array. I have a load of oldish SSD's so might see what I can do with these:

2 x 128 GB Samsung 840
1 x 256 GB Samsung 840
1 x 750 GB Samsung 850

I was thinking of hooking the 128's up to the SAS2008 and building a RAID 0 and then hooking the other 2 up to the Intel disk controller which is SATA2. Any better ideas ? I suspect I can't mix all the disks too much on the SAS controller since they are different capacities and I'll be left with less GBs....
 

Mike W

Kuntrolphreak
Jun 29, 2018
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Suffolk, Va
Was running a similar set up recently using hyper-v and had great results with it. Everyone screams ESXi but hyper-v worked awesome for me. Ran win 10 with hyper-v using.
120gb Samsung 840 evo for os
Storage = 4x 4tb hdd raid 10 on LSI 9271= Reads were around 600mbs
VM’s =4x200gb SAS ssd RAID 10 on LSI 7291 = reads were fast
Ran between 2 - 15 vm’s with issue.

If your comfortable with Windows and don’t know ESXI. Try hyper-v I loved it. Used both but settled with hyper-v due to ease of use for my needs
 
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